With that cheerful thought in mind, I shoved through the garden gate, walked up to the carriage house and knocked on the door. Linus answered after a small pause wearing a gray dress shirt held closed by a single button at his navel. Hints of dark ink and pale skin drew my eye before he gathered the halves of his shirt in a tight fist. A mechanical buzzing filled my ears, and an antiseptic scent made the air taste stringent.
“Am I interrupting?” I kept my eyes glued to his face.
“No.” He stepped back and gestured me in. “I was just thinking about you, actually.”
More like he had been pondering new tortures to inflict upon me. “Oh?”
Papers scattered across the kitchen table, each covered in ornate sigils. A few of the designs niggled at forgotten memories, but all of them were lovely. Linus claimed his work was standardized. From where I stood, it looked like I wasn’t the only one who had trouble recognizing their own talent for flourish.
“Tell me you weren’t holed up designing pop quizzes,” I pleaded. “Is one on the agenda for tomorrow?”
“Again,” he said on a soft laugh, “they wouldn’t be pop quizzes if I warned you about them.”
“Right.” I shook my head. “It’s been a long night.”
“You’re not dressed for work.” He noted my clothes, my mussed hair. “Where did you go?” The final detail, the dried blood on my hands, earned me an arched eyebrow. “What happened?”
I weighed his reaction and determined it to be genuine. “You mean Cletus didn’t tell you?”
“I had plans tonight.” His gaze dipped to his ink-stained fingers. “I set the wraith to follow you but gave explicit instructions not to interfere unless you were in danger.”
Between one blink and the next, the wraith clouded his eyes, an alien sentience that made him appear timeless, ageless, immortal. His forehead wrinkled into neat rows, and he nodded to himself a few times as though listening to a conversation beyond my hearing. All the while, his midnight gaze never left mine.
Funny how my hands hadn’t itched until he mentioned them. Now the skin pulled beneath the dried blood, and I wanted nothing more than to scrub away the reminder of what happened to Marit. About the time I decided I had overstayed my welcome, his vision cleared, and he was simply Linus once more.
“You boarded a riverboat,” he said, confirming my theory he’d been communing with Cletus. “The wraith couldn’t follow.”
“The river.” Water disrupted magic, and moving water negated its power entirely. Not all supernatural creatures could cross even stagnant water. Others shied from currents and still more avoided oceans and their salt. I hadn’t, until this moment, realized wraiths were averse, but the current was strong, and the Atlantic Ocean was eighteen miles away. “I didn’t give it a second thought.”
He scratched his thumbnail on his shirt button. “What were you doing on the Cora Ann?”
“First things first.” I presented my hands. “Blood doesn’t bother me, obviously, but this belongs to a friend.” Or someone who had, until the lights dimmed, the potential of becoming one. “Do you mind if I use your sink?”
The absence of potential in human blood was unsettling. Marit’s coated my hands, about as magic as red paint.
“Help yourself.” He gestured toward the kitchen and followed me in there. “Will you tell me what happened?”
“Have you heard about the Cora Ann haunting?” I cranked the water up hot and poured soap, some fancy brand he’d bought that might as well have been named Cha-Ching, in my palm and started scrubbing. “Apparently it’s been all over the news.”
“I don’t watch television.” He took out his phone and performed a quick search. “Ah. I see. This Cricket person you work for purchased shares in the company?”
“More like she’s bought the right to use the Cora Ann at night for haunted cruises. She doesn’t care about the other boats. If things go well, she might mix it up to include some of the daytime history tours we do too.”
“The injured woman was human?”
“Yes.” I did a double take before thinking through how much the wraith must have seen from its spot on the docks. “The owner’s daughter. I was assigned to help her in the dining room, where the most activity has been logged. Marit told me the ghost boy never bothered her, so my presence must have agitated the spirit.”
“Poltergeist,” he murmured. “It’s escalated to causing physical harm.”
Ever the teacher, he made the correction automatically. It had been a slip of the tongue on my part, but I didn’t want him thinking I was making excuses. Plus, poltergeist was a mouthful. Odds were good I would keep calling him ghost boy regardless of his actual state of existence.
“Will the Society get involved?” He would know better than I. “Their policy is usually to sit back and let these things resolve themselves, but it’s an aggressive haunting. People are getting hurt.”
“I’m not sure.” His lips pulled to one side in the beginnings of a sly grin. “I can call Mother if you’d like.”
I failed to conceal my grimace before it registered, and it amused him all the more. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.” He offered me a dish towel to dry my hands. No paper towels for Linus. “I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.”
“You didn’t,” I lied, searching for a new topic that wasn’t how much I distrusted his mother, and by extension, him. “So…do you know anything about a Detective Caitlin Russo with the Savannah Police Department?”
“The name sounds familiar.” He mulled it over then shrugged. “Who is she?”
“A problem.” I sucked in a breath and outlined her escalation from concerned officer with a soft spot for domestic abuse cases to a hard-ass with a hard-on for proving Maud did not go into that good night, gently or otherwise. “I’m not sure how tight she is with Cricket, but a friendship between the two would explain how Russo knew I was back in Savannah.”
“I’ll look into her.” A frown gathered in neat rows across his forehead. “Let me know if she approaches you again.”
“Count on it.” As much as I hated outing her to the Society, I couldn’t risk being the reason she outed the Society itself. “I told you about my night. What’s with all the drawings?”
“I’ve been working on a project.” He shrugged like it was a small thing and passed over an ornate sigil I had never seen before, the combination unknown though I recognized the individual parts hidden within the art. The drawing was a yew tree, one of Hecate’s emblems, and its black limbs stretched through a crescent moon. Its tangled roots grew to form a circle, a symbol of power, that encompassed the topmost portion of the design. “It’s not perfect yet, but I’m making progress.”
I traced the emblem with my fingertip. “What does it do?”
Linus decided the papers were in need of shuffling. “It’s a talisman against Last Seeds.”
“What?” I caught him by the arm. “Why?”
He studied where my hand touched him and made no move to escape. “Do you really have to ask?”
We were no closer to discovering the identity of the master vampire who had kidnapped me. Though it made sense he would be a Last Seed since they topped the vampire hierarchy. Not to mention other clans had volunteered their heritors, at least two Last Seeds themselves, to the cause. That required the kind of power you couldn’t amass in a made vampire’s lifetime. Or several of them.
And then there was Volkov. He hadn’t died in the massacre when I made my escape. Boaz had made certain of that. The idea he might escape one day… That he might serve out his sentence and be released…
Forever was an interminably long time to imagine until it came with an expiration date.
I noticed I was still clutching him and willed my fingers to let go. “You did this for me.”
“It’s a useful protective sigil no one has fully explored since Last Seeds are so rare most necromancers will never meet one, let alone interact with one.” More papers in a different pile also required extensive straightening. “I can patent its composition if I can perfect it. Patents can be quite lucrative. This one in particular, now that the Undead Coalition is hemorrhaging members.”
“True,” I allowed. “But thank you anyway.”
He shook his head, just once. “Don’t thank me.”
“Too late. I already did.” Even if the design was inspired by me rather than designed for me, the result would be the same. I could wear it on my skin as a protection, as a comfort that I would never be helpless against their compulsion again. Volkov would no longer be the monster under my bed. This was as good as plugging in a nightlight. “Can you teach me how to paint it?”
“Once it’s marketable, yes.”
The dream of wearing his sigil as a shield evaporated, and I deflated on the spot. If he was seeking to patent a new design, he wouldn’t want to share it until the paperwork was finalized. That could take months. Years.
“I didn’t design it for application in the field,” he explained. “I had a more proactive approach in mind.”
The impermanent nature of our ink meant all sigils were intended to be drawn the moment before their use. Otherwise, the blood dried and the ink flaked, nulling its power. “What do you mean?”
“Let me show you.” He unfastened the single button he’d been twiddling and parted the halves of his shirt, exposing the hard planes of his stomach. The yew tree tattoo covered his left hipbone in one of the few blank spaces left on his torso. The rest of his chest and abs were a masterpiece in progress, a canvas filled with loops and whorls, with magic. “I’ve been testing it on myself.”
I traced the design, mesmerized, and his abs clenched under my touch. Gooseflesh rose on his skin beneath my fingertips, and a hot wash of embarrassment singed my cheeks.